Quote:
Originally Posted by Liviu_5
Completely agreed with the above; my point though was that right now for a large (actually very large) subset of e-books there are no good or even mediocre alternatives to pdf/djvu. This is why in talking about e-books I distinguish between 3 categories:
- text based - may contain images, simple graphics, footnotes, pictures and special characters and fonts, but they reflow nicely and any e-book format including Mobipocket, MsLit, Html (opf), Imp, Lrf will do for them and even txt and rtf at some marginal cost
- e-books for which the 2 dimensional structure is essential, like math books, art books, some fiction books as mentioned - for these I just do not see right now an alternative for pdf/djvu, unless you are content to make them image books and lose searching and other goodies - then anything like in point 3 will do, but you still lose reflowing
- image e-books (for example non-ocr'ed scans) - whatever the opinion regarding their legitimacy, the fact is that they exist and for them pdf/djvu while not essential is still the best solution since the question of reflowing does not arise; you can definitely use anything that admits embedded images (even simple html will do), but here pdf is convenient rather than necessary
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I believe the second form has the ability to be displayed and reflowed depending on the way the content has to be presented. Math formulas seldom need the full width of a page and are usually set off from the main forms. These are easy to create as images and they can be displayed as such without loss of information. the surrounding text can be reflowed as needed. Thus most of such documents can be searched and read while the images should be viewed inline. This won't work for everything but will for quite a few things. It depends on the original author to some degree to design the original document with an idea of how to display it when reflowed. I write technical manuals which can often require some 2D kind of display but can still be coerced into a reflowed document with advanced planning.
There are also situations where pages need to be turned and some images overflow on facing pages. This kinds of things require large images to work properly and the viewing software must either allow panning and zoom to study the image or break it up into multiple images (tile). The situation dictates the technique that is required. This is like resorting to a foldout page in a paper document.
If you can design a book for arbitrary dimensions as required for most text books then you can design the book for even smaller arbitrary dimensions if needed.
Dale